


won't go on and on

by ailurish



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: Domestic, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-07
Updated: 2012-08-07
Packaged: 2017-11-11 15:11:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/479855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ailurish/pseuds/ailurish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You and I go shopping and fall asleep inside a mattress store.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	won't go on and on

**Author's Note:**

> Written for TSN Winter-a-Thon, and also because of sleepy!Mark.

Eduardo first notices it about two weeks after moving to Palo Alto -- he’s still reminding himself not to count down the days; each day feels a little bit like it’s stolen. And not in the idyllic romance sort of way, but in the anxious I’m-doing-something-I-shouldn’t sort of way, which naturally makes him feel tense until he remembers that he lives here now. He isn’t shirking any Singapore duties by being in California because, well, this is home.

It takes him a while to pinpoint the reason his back is sore.

It could be that unnecessary guilt, and he could even blame it on the higher instances of, well, physical activity – Mark keeps saying this is _their_ house (emphasis Eduardo’s, since Mark tries his best not to be obvious about how thrilling the use of the collective is) and so they’re allowed to have sex wherever they want.

So that could be the reason his back is stiff, and his neck sometimes in the mornings, and why his shoulder pinching in the muscle every now and then. But it isn’t the reason, not entirely, which Eduardo figures out after tumbling out of bed one morning. Literally tumbling, because he meant to swing his legs over the edge but his back had protested.

“Mark. We need a new mattress.” 

Mark squints down at him, a look that would be a glare if he were actually awake, and mutters something unintelligible into his pillow.

At work, Eduardo’s desk chair doubles as a torture device, and he contemplates asking his assistant to schedule him an appointment with a chiropractor or a masseuse. Or hell, getting him one of those ergonomic chairs. Instead he Googles the nearest mattress store.

Mark is home when Eduardo gets in that evening, sitting on the couch with his laptop, the TV running on mute. He pauses typing when Eduardo, having shucked his jacket and left his shoes at the door, flops heavily onto the couch next to him. “Hey.”

“Wardo,” Mark acknowledges, simultaneously resuming his typing. 

And Eduardo is fine with this – he knows that Mark never really stops working, but he doesn’t completely wire in at home either, not when they both have only a few hours of downtime on the weeknights. Eduardo leans into Mark’s side, stares blankly at the action playing out on the silent television. His back is still sore, but the couch is comfortable and so is Mark’s warmth at his side. He leans in long enough to drop a kiss on Mark’s shoulder, maybe a little closer to the junction of shirt collar and skin than is really necessary. Mark keeps typing, but he’s not really focused, leaning back into Eduardo as much as he can while still keeping his eyes on the screen.

It’s as good a time as any to bring it up again, so Eduardo asks if Mark remembers what he had said that morning.

“Which thing? The mattress thing?”

“Yeah. I mean it, Mark, how old is that mattress?”

Mark shrugs.

“That’s what I thought. Aren’t you supposed to replace it every four years or something?”

“Wardo, a mattress is a mattress. I don’t see the problem.”

“Yeah, because you sleep at your desk most nights,” Eduardo says, only partly teasing, but it makes Mark’s fingers still. He looks over at Eduardo, wearing a tiny frown.

“That’s not true. I’m not – we’re not in college, I know when to sleep. Don’t give me that look. You know I sleep in a bed, you drag me there.”

Eduardo can’t help it if his teasing smile turns into a smirk. Mark regards him for a second, then deliberately shuts his laptop.

Eduardo’s body is still in de-stress mode from the day, so there’s no real hurry, here. Whatever Mark was working on must not have been too important, because he sets his laptop on the floor and pushes into Eduardo’s space until he’s lying flat, Mark’s hands on either side of his head and the rest of him a warm, heavy weight along Eduardo’s body.

“That’s not what I meant,” Mark chides, mouthing at the underside of Eduardo’s jaw. He _hmm_ ’s in response, unapologetic, and Mark shifts forward on his hands to kiss him properly, letting one knee slot neatly in between Eduardo’s legs.

Mark eventually shifts back on his haunches, hands going to Eduardo’s belt. Eduardo moves to push himself up onto his elbows and lift his hips at the same time, and a twinge of pain shoots up from his lower back. He tries not to cringe but Mark sees it anyway, and even if he hadn’t, Eduardo lets out an involuntary “ouch.”

Mark pauses, looks at Eduardo with dark, wide eyes. “’Ouch’?”

“It’s fine, sorry, not your fault, don’t stop,” Eduardo says in a rush, but Mark is still looking at him uncertainly.

“Okay,” Mark says, hands still light at Eduardo’s hips. “Okay, we’ll get a new mattress.”

-

They don’t actually get around to mattress-buying any time in the next week, however, partially because Eduardo insists on making the decision together, and also because finding free time proves to be tricky. It’s the kind of week that Mark spends mostly in the office and Eduardo spends conferencing at ridiculous hours with various clients in Singapore. He’ll probably always have contacts over there despite moving his main office back to the States, and Mark, well, Mark will always have sleepless nights at Facebook.

This is something else that Eduardo has learned to accept. He closes out of a video conference at 2:34 a.m. one morning and goes up the stairs to find Mark sacked out in bed; he hadn’t even noticed him come home. With a slight pang of guilt, he slides in next to Mark, tries to match his breathing until he, too, falls asleep.

But Mark is gone already in the morning. Eduardo frowns; he couldn’t have gotten more than a few hours of sleep.

It goes on like this even after Eduardo’s schedule has evened out. The start of the year is always a mess, and Mark still thinks he needs to be available for all of it. He spends some nights at the office, and Eduardo can’t keep tabs on him all the time, so he isn’t sure how many of those nights are spent crashed on the couch in his office and how many of them are spent working.

He settles for texting him at meal times, cornering Mark in the kitchen when their paths cross in the morning, and remembering that this is better than when he was not seeing Mark at all, living halfway across the earth.

-

Late Saturday afternoon, Eduardo closes the fridge door and is surprised to see Mark leaning in the doorway, hands hidden in his hoodie pockets. 

“Hey,” Eduardo says after a moment, and Mark smiles with the corner of his mouth. He looks like hell, to be honest, and Eduardo considers taking the lunch meat back out of the fridge to make sure he’s eaten. He refrains.

“We should go,” Mark says. “Now, if you really want that mattress. I took the afternoon off.”

Taking an afternoon, Eduardo knows, is akin to taking the whole weekend off in Mark’s book. Truth be told, Eduardo had all but forgotten about the mattress, save for the ache in his shoulders.

“It can wait, if you’re still busy. Really.”

“It’s fine,” Mark says, like it really is fine, and in a moment Eduardo recognizes this as Mark’s way of proving that he’s in this, that making the move from Singapore was worth it, is worth it. 

Eduardo doesn’t need any reinforcement in his decision – really, Mark should know that by now – but he’s not going to protest either. “Let’s go then,” he says, moving in to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth; it really does feel like days since he’s seen Mark. “We’ll take my car.” Mark only shrugs, so Eduardo grabs his keys and they head out.

-

In the end, a mattress store is a mattress store, so they head to whichever is closest. It’s a wide building, row upon row of bed frames and mattresses.

Mark had been mostly silent on the drive, rolling his eyes at Eduardo when he had tried to explain what they were looking for, size and comfort and material.

“We should just pick the best one they have.”

“It doesn’t work that way, what’s best for you might not be best for someone else. It’s like buying a car, you have to be practical.”

“You’re putting too much effort into this,” Mark says.

“It’s important! People can really screw up their bodies, Mark, sleeping the wrong way night after night.”

“Whatever, you just compared choosing a mattress to buying a car.”

It’s hardy a logical end to the conversation, and Eduardo tells him so, but Mark smirks at him as if he’s won, anyway.

A woman busy with customers – the only other customers in the store – says hello, and then out of seemingly nowhere, there’s a man standing at Eduardo’s shoulder, holding out a hand. He’s middle-aged and seems a little harried, which is at odds with the next-to-nothing traffic that must come through the place, but he introduces himself as Stephen and smiles at them both. Even Mark, whose attention is elsewhere.

“Can I show you boys around?” he asks.

“No,” Mark says, at the same time as Eduardo says “Sure, thanks.”

There’s a beat of silence, and Mark raises his eyebrows at Eduardo. Pick your battles, Saverin. “You look around, I’ll follow the salesguy,” he suggests, and Mark nods, heading off in whatever direction he’d been looking before they were interrupted.

Most of what Stephen the salesman says only serves to prove Mark right, in that Eduardo eventually stops caring about the perfect box spring or level of support to spine and head. There are mattresses with memory foam, down-feather pillowtops, air support and Sleep Numbers, all of which seems to be making this more of a hassle than necessary, but Eduardo just nods along politely. He declines any offers on deals for bed frames or box springs, and eventually Stephen leaves him to it, says to just let him know when they’re ready.

Scanning quickly over the display mattresses for Mark, Eduardo doesn’t see him anywhere, figures he must have gotten a call from work, and just starts testing mattresses the fool-proof way: by flopping down onto them and deciding which one feels the most like he’s lying on a cloud.

“Excuse me, sir?” 

Eduardo sits up quickly, feeling foolish. It’s the saleslady who greeted them at the door, looking slightly nervous. “Your, um… can you tell your friend that we offer 14-day trials on mattresses if he wants to try them at home?”

“Sorry?”

“Sleeping isn’t allowed in the store, sir.”

Eduardo is torn between laughing and sighing when what she’s saying finally breaks over him. “Oh, jesus. Where, um?” and she points down to her left.

Mark is indeed asleep on one of the California kings. Eduardo can’t help but laugh, just a bit – only Mark would crash out in a public place, too tired to care, or just careless either way.

“Mark,” he says gently, reaching out to shake his leg. Mark doesn’t react, completely dead to the world, sleeping like he’s been awake for days. Which, Eduardo concedes, he very nearly has. 

Thing is, Eduardo has never been able to bring himself to wake Mark up. It’s antithetical to his instinct, which is to put Mark to sleep whenever possible. Maybe he’s learned to back off and trust that Mark can take care of himself, but it’s not like he’s wrong. Clearly Mark needed sleep this much.

Eduardo scans quickly around the room again; the nervous employee has disappeared from sight, and Stephen is over near the door, chatting with a couple and their small daughter. Eduardo isn’t doing anything wrong, really, by laying down next to Mark; he has to see if the mattress fits his comfort as well.

For all Mark’s disbelief in the importance of the perfect mattress, he has good taste. Or good luck, because Eduardo melts back into this one, stretching and feeling his muscles loosen. He turns towards Mark, watching him sleep. He looks young, Harvard-young, and it brings back memories that Eduardo had used to shy away from: too many nights spent in Kirkland, not enough beds, or just not enough room on Mark’s bed for the two of them. 

This one has more than enough. Mark is lying on his back, one hand resting on his sternum, body curled slightly towards the center of the bed. At home he would be starfished out, taking up space, so while it might feel like this mattress swallows them up, Eduardo knows that they need the comfort room.

Pretty comfortable right now, though. Mark’s breathing is steady, chest rising slowly, and Eduardo just wants to curl into him, soak up the calm. He decides against moving, just looks back at the recessed ceiling and listens to the light rock playing from the store’s speakers. He’ll wake Mark up in a few minutes, or whenever the saleswoman comes back, just. Not right now.

-

He’s moving – or, no, the bed is shaking – and Eduardo wakes up. It takes him a moment to place himself. Mark is there, but this isn’t home, and Eduardo is still wearing shoes.

“ _Excuse me._ ”

Shit. Eduardo rolls onto his back from where he’d been lying on his side, hand sliding off Mark’s ribcage as he goes. “Shit,” says aloud, or tries to say, letting the now-irritated saleswoman come into focus, “we fell asleep.”

He apologizes groggily to the woman, scrubbing a hand over his face and trying for charming, but her expression doesn’t waver. 

“Mark.” Eduardo nudges him. “Hey. We fell asleep.”

“Hm?” Mark’s forehead creases, but he keeps his eyes shut, so Eduardo nudges him more firmly until they open. It seems to take him less time to realize what happened; he takes in a deep, sleep-heavy breath and lets it out again. “Oh.”

“I’m very sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to either make a purchase or leave,” says the saleswoman, reminding them of her presence. Despite her words, the edge seems to have gone out of her voice.

Eduardo would rather lie here and relax – however impromptu his nap was, he’d still been interrupted – but Mark rolls away and pulls himself up onto his elbows. His eyes are still lined with exhaustion, but he looks a lot better than he had when he’d shown up at home earlier.

Mark looks up at the saleswoman, eyes narrowed, regarding her sleepily. “We’ll take it,” he says.

“You will! Wonderful.”

Mark drops down again and smiles lazily at Eduardo, patting the mattress between them. “This one’s perfect.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo laughs, “this one,” and he rolls back in towards Mark, not even a little bit embarrassed anymore, and hides his smile in the crook of Mark’s arm.


End file.
